1996
Yehuda Safran
First of all I want to say that there are some technical difficulties with the microphones, which means that those of you who are sitting far away would be well advised to come nearer.
Secondly I find that it is a small good fortune that in an event that is built around the idea of sound and space we have to consider in such a direct manner and apply ourselves so immediately to the question of what we hear and what are the conditions of this hearing.
This event has grown out of the work done in our studio at the graduate school of architecture with Steven Holl. He along with Bernard Tschumi, the dean, immediately responded with enthusiasm to the possibility of discussing the question of sound in relation to place and in connection with the work of Max Neuhaus.
Of course Max Neuhaus has often been in the States, but not recently. His works have been installed in a number of locations in America, but at the moment none is active. His work exists only in situ, which means that for those of us here in America it is difficult to experience directly - to travel to places like Bordeaux, Bern, Turin, Kassel, and so on. It is also rather difficult for us to discuss because although he works solely with sound the work is not reproducible in any way; it is not recordable. So I think it is extraordinary that we are here to discuss this kind of work, and I want to thank Max for making the effort to be here.
Arthur Danto, I probably need not introduce him in this place since I have just arrived here a couple of months ago and he's been here twenty five years at least. Hopefully he will continue to be here longer. So Arthur Danto who is best known as a philosopher but also as somebody who is deeply involved in the arts has already written on Max's work, responded to Max's work. And this is how I was able to become aware myself of this appreciation and this connection. So we are extremely happy that he was able to come and discuss this subject with Max here.
Now the procedure this evening is very simple, that Max Neuhaus will begin, then Arthur Danto will respond, and after a while we will turn to the floor and hopefully we will have a conversation with more than three voices, and then we will have some drinks after the lecture, in the hall.
Max Neuhaus
Good evening. The title given to our conversation this evening is 'sound and space'. I make a large variety of artworks with sound - different forms - but one of the largest groups of works are works in a form which I call place. These have been categorized as part of the plastic arts even though they are immaterial and invisible. So perhaps the first point to bring up is why a person who works only with sound and doesn't make any changes in a given situation visually is considered a sculptor.
When I began working in this direction I didn't think about it, but over the years I've had to answer this question. I found that a very effective way to answer it is by pointing out that we perceive space itself and also the character of space, which we could call place, both with the eye in how we see it, what colors it is, what shapes it has, and at the same time and less obviously with the ear.
The ear's perception of a place is largely unconscious unless you are a person who is particularly focused on sound. But just because it's unconscious doesn't mean that it's not powerful. The classic example is the feeling of complete disorientation when you walk into what's called an anechoic chamber where there is no sound and every sound made is absorbed immediately. The space you see is believable, but the one you perceive with your ear isn't. Your feeling in this space which is missing only the dimension of sound is a powerful disorientation.
The ear and the eye work as a team; they are interdependent. Sculptors who deal with space visually change what the eye sees, and by doing that change it as a whole. I work in the other door of perception, the ear. I change what the ear perceives as the space and therefore also change it as a whole.
I think the form of this evening would be more interesting if Arthur and I exchanged ideas immediately rather than after long periods of exposition, so I'll be quiet right now, Arthur.
Arthur Danto
Well, okay. One of the things that interested me almost immediately in Max's work was its conceptual innovation, as it seemed to me that this has been a period of remarkable redefinition in the plastic arts - 'plastic' is probably better than 'visual' arts, but it's also a concession of a certain sort- and particularly in the idea of sculpture.
Josef Beuys called himself a social sculptor, and various other individuals think of themselves as sculptors although they're very remote indeed from the hammer and chisel or the direct molding of clay sense of sculpture. Sculpture as near as I can tell must have something to do with the definition of space, or definition of particular spaces. But that can be extremely plastic in the way in which Beuys for example was involved in transformations of society, transformations of consciousness.
I felt that there was both something avant-garde about what Max was doing and at the same time something quite magical when one actually encountered them.
It's a little bit abstract and dry to talk about sculpture, but I was immediately taken with the Times Square piece. It was at one of those little islands that very few people pay much attention to unless they're buying theater tickets at some discount in Times Square. When Max told me about Times Square I felt that that was something I had to go immediately to see with the same kind of urgency that one feels one's got to see an exhibition or piece of architecture when it's described, and one feels: I must put myself in the presence of that work.
When I went and found the island, found the grate from which this piece rose up as a definitely shaped piece of sound, I felt truly like it was a Shakespearean product. It was the kind of thing that Shakespeare talks about in The Tempest when Prospero summons these voices out of air and saw those invisible sounds. The basic shape it seems to me belongs to Prospero's domain, and the idea that it was coming from underground gave it a kind of Caliban identity as well.
I'm trying to think of how many of Max's pieces I've actually experienced. There's the one in Chicago, and there's the one in Kassel. But I've read wonderful descriptions of pieces that I would like very much to have seen, but they probably will never come back I suppose.
MN
Some of them will: some of them could be restored.
As I work within the plastic arts I'm often confronted with the principal platform of presentation in the plastic arts -- the exhibition. None of my work fits into the idea of an exhibition, except the drawings.
I think it might clarify things if I describe my process. I approach doing a work in two large steps. The first is coming to an agreement with a specific place, in other words choosing a place and taking it on. This establishes a boundary around what the piece can be.
The second step is building the work's sound. I never build a sound outside the space and then place it there. Once I've decided on the site for a work I go to it and start making sound in it. The work grows out of my learning what happens with sound there, learning about the people who use it, learning about the place that I want to construct with sound. Constructing it is following a pathway. I know it's done when it works. I think the only important thing for an artist to know in terms of technique is when to stop -- when the work is there.
Many of these sound works have physical shapes. As Arthur said, the piece in Times Square was located on one of the pedestrian islands there. The island already contained a triangular grating when I found it - large, ten meters by three meters. It was that grating and the possibility of using it to build a block of sound that you would walk through, walk in and out of, which was the beginning of my fascination with this place.
Although the island seems like a kind of no man's land in the middle of the square, in fact thousands of people cross it every day as they pass through the square.
Another thing perhaps to mention is that this work was anonymous. This was something I had to struggle for. Although I was willing to give up having my name on it, the people who provided some of the money were not happy about it. For me, though, it was crucial. One of the 'revelations' that led me out of my first activities as a solo musician was a desire to work outside the cultural context, with people who were not expecting an encounter with an aesthetic experience. I believed then and still believe now that it's possible, as an artist, to deal with a broad spectrum of people who aren't necessarily initiated into cultural rituals, not by simplifying or trying to find a lowest common denominator, but by putting something very special in front of them, allowing them to encounter it outside the framework of art; without the preconceptions of art, allowing them to think about it in their own terms -- allowing people to find it when they are ready. I believe the aesthetic experience is natural to the human being, it's not something we have to learn.
The sound, when it was there (1), was subtle. If it was in this room right now it would be very hard to talk over it, but in the context of Times Square it was something you could notice or not notice. One of the first curious reactions that I got about it, or curious to me, was: does anyone hear it? Or basically being disconcerted by the fact that not everyone heard it. But this idea comes from music, where if the audience doesn't pay attention it's bad enough, but if they don't even notice it it's tragic.
AD
A lot of people found it, but certainly a lot of people didn't. I mean, the last thing I suppose anybody has on their minds when they try to get across Broadway at that point is an aesthetic experience. New Yorkers are characteristically in a hurry, and that's a very difficult piece of New York real estate to traverse.
But it interestingly struck me that certain people really seemed to have been stopped dead in their tracks by it and other people walked through. I think there is an analogy. Carl Andre, the minimalist sculptor, whose work you're probably familiar with characteristically would be a square metal plate on the floor or sometimes a group of square metal plates like tiles, maybe twelve by twelve. You know, there's not much to that. But Carl Andre said from his point of view he could just see a great column of space rising - that was the base for that column of space - and once you see that it would give you a kind of frisson at the very least to feel that you were walking through that column by stepping across it.
MN
I think it's very true with his works. I fundamentally believe that no one ever perceives an artwork until they're ready to perceive it. Marketing it doesn't change the number of people who actually perceive it. The aesthetic experience is unique to each person; when they're ready to perceive it they perceive it. The only way to allow more people to experience an artwork is to make it more accessible and perhaps to make them less self conscious about it.
AD
I did encounter at any rate people who felt themselves to be in the presence of something rather remarkable and were prepared to as it were sit next to it for a period of time. It was not something you'd listen to the way you listen to music.
One other analogy, because I'm anxious to fill in as much space as I can. I was reading some background for the Jasper Johns show which is on at the Museum of Modern Art now, and Johns said that he was initially interested in objects that you see and you know all about them. There's nothing to look at; it's not like getting deeper into them visually. It's not like looking at the School of Athens; it's not like looking at the Last Judgment. But a flag, you know all there is to know about it visually at any rate the moment that you see it.
And I think monochrome paintings would be analogous. You could have certain experiences in front of them; but it wouldn't be like getting deeper and deeper into the composition, deeper and deeper into the space, et cetera. There are a lot of questions to be raised about monochrome which might be an analog, if you could have three dimensional monochromes, to the Times Square piece.
I guess what I'm getting at is, under what modality of hearing do you hear it? You can't listen to it; you can't follow it. It doesn't seem to be a piece of music if we think of music as something which has a structure in time. It had no structure in time. It did simply have spatial contours so you would walk through it, but it would be a little bit more tangible or palpable than walking through a column by Carl Andre.
MN
Less imaginary. It's the sound wave touching a very sensitive part of your body which lets you hear. With Andre, as soon as you say this plate projects a space, of course you see the space and you see what it does. If you think of his pieces, it's very clear - your imagination constructs it. But with Times Square you don't construct everything for yourself, you enter something which is touching, which surrounds you even though it's intangible.
The ear and the eye perceive the world in completely different terms. Although the eye is geared for space and the ear for time, each looks to the other to confirm its perception of reality.
I think it's important what you said, Arthur. Although I came from music, these ideas have nothing to do with music. It's often musicians who have the hardest time understanding these pieces because they wait for the music to begin, and of course it never does.
I describe the sounds of many of them as continuums, a texture of sound color which is constant. It's always there, it never changes. You change it by your frame of mind when you enter it and when you leave it.
But, coming back to music, communication with sound has always rested on the dimension of time. If we think of my speaking right now, if I just start to say a word by saying 'st' I haven't said the word. The word only has meaning as I finish saying it, and that takes time. Music itself as an artform exists only in time. These works have no time in that sense.
AD
It would be interesting to try and vary the example a little bit because the one in Chicago as I recall it was a very dynamic piece. You encountered it in the stairwell; this was in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, since destroyed (2) I guess or sold because they built a new museum and a very handsome one. But Max's piece was in a stairwell; and my feeling of it was that it was like wading through a stream that is to say, as you climb up the stairs or down the stairs it was either with the stream or against the stream, so it had some of the structure of a waterfall. It was like something that you'd find at Tivoli for example with those elaborate fountains, and the experience of it was in consequence very different.
The piece in Times Square was, inappropriately maybe, Platonic; it was geometrical and architectural. But in a way the piece in Chicago was like a piece of landscape engineering or landscape architecture; it had a topography.
MN
Many times I make a sound that's almost plausible in the space, it fits there. It's the point where you don't accept its plausibility there, where you notice the difference, the shift, that you move into the work itself.
The work in Chicago was made up of very low rumbling sounds which resembled sounds of air systems in buildings, it was generally plausible there. but it was much more substantial. It was loud moving air, I changed the way air moved in there. It also had a topography. But it was still plausible enough for some people to insist there was nothing there.
AD
But the thing about the Chicago piece is that it wasn't just the ears; that was the important thing. There was something more kinesthetic about it; you felt a little bit disoriented. You felt as though you were moving upstream or downstream, and those are not totally aural sensations. So to me it indicates that the experience of sound is a lot more complex than the inner calculations of the location of a noise or encountering a sound as one did at Times Square. Here, one's entire body and even one's sense of stability in a certain sense is engaged. After all, the ear is the organ of balance as well; and one felt in the Chicago piece - what is the title of it?
MN
It was untitled.
AD
As I remember it, it wasn't as anonymous on the other hand. I think there used to be a plaque that said 'untitled by Max Neuhaus'. So you'd start looking around for 'untitled'; and it was not as it were easy to find because very few people are prepared in a museum of art, even contemporary art, to encounter something with quite that degree of invisibility.
MN
The label made it even more effective in this case. In a cultural context it makes the work more effective as something to be found. If you see a label in a museum, you expect to see something to go with it.
AD
I would like to put this in some kind of historical perspective. Probably the history is not much deeper than your own biography. But what interests me is that this seems to be a form of sculpture which is totally contingent upon a technology, which didn't exist earlier, and probably fairly high powered technology, mainly electronic. Are there any antecedents in history for something like this, outside of Shakespearean comedies?
MN
I don't know. The technology didn't exist when I started; I had to invent it as I went along. Now, even though the technical possibilities have advanced incredibly, I still have to adapt it to what I do. But it's electronics itself makes what I do possible for the first time. It's the first means we've had to actually shape sound, and also the first means to make a sound without a beginning or an end -- This is what allowed me to move sound beyond an event.
But I as an artist don't feel very much different than other artists. I think the process of making an artwork is universal, one of beginning on a pathway and finding your way down it, whether you're making a painting or a piece of physical sculpture.I think what art does is communicate spirit. A painting is one kind of carrier that's been around for a long time. It's a very versatile carrier of spirit. Shaped blocks of stone can also be carriers of spirit. But from a very early age my focus has been around sound, so it's quite natural that when I started being an artist that's what I used.
AD
I didn't make myself clear. I had a certain image in mind. I thought that in certain periods of architecture, particularly the baroque - but it's not just architecture, it's strong in great periods of art - they used everything they could find, so that when Bernini does the Cornaro Chapel for example he's going to use everything. It's going to be architecture; it's going to be sculpture. If he finds a way to use painting, he's going to use painting. If he finds a way of using light, he's going to use light. What a shame that he didn't have sound to work with, because there could be that low ecstatic moan for example as you go into the Cornaro Chapel; or in the dome of St. Peter's you're not sure you hear it, but celestial voices, celestial choir.
MN
I don't know, Arthur, I'm not sure I like this line.
AD
You don't like the line? Too literal, too referential?
MN
In a way, yes. Also I believe more is often less.
A large part of what we perceive, the communication we get through our ear, is literal; it's listening to the things of the world. We hear that that is a dog, that is a car, that is something falling down. It's literal information.
Another part of what we perceive as communication from sound is codified as language. This small group of sounds which I'm making in the English language are not literal; the sound of the word 'literal' doesn't have anything to do with the notion of literal.
When I build a sound texture, I work with something which I've finally found a term for, which I call sound character. It's a part of both the literal and the codified communication of sound.
We have an innate sense of sound character. It is inherent in spoken language, though unconscious. It's how we say a word, its inflection. Superimposed on our verbal language, it tells the listener how to interpret the meaning of our words. We speak it by shaping the contours of tone and emphasis of our speech and also by adjusting the sound of different parts of the words, the rise and fall of pitch and loudness and the timbre of our phonemes. Our response to these nuances is highly refined: through minute differences in sound character we are often able to pinpoint the birthplace of a speaker.
Part of this language is also used in music as a dimension called sound color. It was introduced with the development of orchestration, the idea that there is musical meaning inherent in the nature of the sound itself, not only the melody and harmony.
I have been interested in going further, distilling this color essence. That's what I do when I build a sound texture in one of these place works.
One could describe sound character as having a number of continuums of meaning lying between various points, say, harsh and smooth or rich and thin or warm and cold, superimposed upon each other. In between these points, within the nature of the sound itself, lies an infinite zone of meaning.
It's not literal because although we could say a work of mine sounds like something, that would be like saying that a certain shape in an abstract painting looks like a banana. And it is uncodified, which means you don't have to learn it; it can be transcultural. This is the carrier of meaning in these sound works. The question of what a work of mine sounds like has always seemed superficial to me.
AD
But in some cases you have done that, I think, like the one which I just found so evocative: a bell for Saint Cecilia in Cologne. That's a specific sound with a specific location and a definite identity.
MN
Good point. I should describe the piece a little. It was in a park next to a church which was no longer a church. The main entrance had been bricked up, and the building was now used as a historical museum.
A strange kind of scene. This facade of a church, this arched entrance filled with rough cement blocks - it fascinated me. You first encountered the work as you walked through the park in front of the facade. You heard a bell, but it wasn't like a church bell. It was very high and bright, more like a small bell that somebody would ring in a cloisters. So, yes, I made a sound which had the literal meaning of a bell at the point where your first heard it. That was the teaser, the entrance to the work.
But it also had something else. The bell seemed to emanate from the facade itself, the whole facade. And as you moved towards the facade, what you heard changed. At a certain point in front of the bricked-up doorway, you realized that this was not a bell at all. Although it started with a bright ting, when it began to die away there was another structure, a complex structure, which at some points even grew louder. It was never the same, each stroke died away differently. It was this zone which was the work's place, where I built its sound character.
So just as Chicago had sounds that could have been construed as an air conditioner - the literal for me is only playing a game of plausibility or making it fit - the sound of Times Square could only be justified as a machine sound because of its context. It was a logical justification in its context. If you heard that sound alone in this room, the idea would not occur to you.
AD
So what was the experience of people who heard as it were materialize out of nothing, I guess, a disembodied bell?
MN
The contradiction was subtle. My idea was that the literal bell sound was what brought them to the place of the work - the curiosity of how could this bell be coming from this facade.
AD
There was no bell to be seen, so you found yourself hearing a bell-like noise but no way of explaining it.
MN
But the fact that it was coming from a surface -
AD
As if it were to come from the middle of the table -
MN
Or come from the whole back wall because it was projected on the wall.
AD
It's hard to think of that as a bell, because a bell sound as big as that -
MN
Even though it's very high and bright, yes, that was the contradiction. Although most people wouldn't analyze it as a contradiction, it functioned as a contradiction. The ear knew this wasn't right. Facades don't sound like high bells.
We are not used to using our ears for an aesthetic experience except in music. In real life the ear in most of us just keeps chugging along doing its job of telling us its part of where we are and what is happening. This gives me a certain advantage as an artist. I can quietly say to it: and what about putting this into your perceptual framework.
AD
How often did it go on?
MN
It went on continuously twenty four hours a day.
AD
So you could never walk in the park without hearing that.
MN
Or you could walk through the park every day and never be curious enough to notice it.
YS
Is this a good moment to turn to the questions?
Q1
I want to ask you a question. You were talking about placing it historically, Professor Danto. And I was wondering what the artist would say to characterize the difference between sound that we encounter and we can sort of understand materially, for example, walking into the Pantheon and hearing the quality of the sound of footsteps. Or another thing that came to mind is the rock piece by Nuguchi at the Met, the one that has the water trickling down it. Suddenly you come upon it, and the sound of it is very important. But we can understand materially what's making the sound. You spoke of the Times Square piece as perhaps we would imagine that a machine is under there generating steam or whatever it is.
MN
The sound isn't machine-like at all. It's only the context that makes you think of that; it's the only logical possibility. It puts the viewer in a state of questioning - it's not machine-like, but it could only be a machine - and brings him into an inquisitive condition. It's a technique to bring him to a new locus.
Q1
Did you want us to be able to figure out what the sound was, like we suddenly have this picture of a machine under there humming away? Or did you want to alienate us from that?
MN
No, I want to bring you into a new place, not a specific place that I've made, but a new perception of place. The pieces are never aggressive. The reactions that I remember when I've encountered people who had discovered the piece by themselves they don't know why it is there or what it is, but they're not really concerned about that.
Q1
It's plausible.
MN
It's plausible and not plausible - that's something I like. For me that plausible-implausible tension is what allows me to bring you to that place where you wouldn't be without it -- not being able to resolve the dilemma. The dilemma is not a life-shaking dilemma. You can walk through it and not respond to it at all.
Q1
When you walk across a wooden floor and it creaks, you're having an architectural experience of a reality. You might be surprised that it suddenly creaks, but you might find it pleasant because you understand something about the way the thing is made or the quality of the material.
MN
That fits into our whole literal communication with sound, and that's one of the things I play with by making a sound which has a varying degree of plausibility. I'm taking your literal sense and your need to find out where you are with your ears as well as your eyes and shifting it just a little and making something new. It's also what artists who work visually do.
AD
I think just one thing about that. If the experience were simply that this is a noise that a machine makes that's got to do with the subway system, then that wouldn't be able to account for the occasional extreme importance attached to that sound by people who make a point of going back and back.
A student here at Columbia did some interviewing at Times Square- Andro Santo who's a sociologist - and the testimony for me was quite interesting. A lot of people never heard it, but there were some people for whom it was as deep an experience as music could be, who went there over and over for a kind of spiritual reassurance almost. And that would be consistent with the idea that it's like music and not so consistent with the idea that it's a natural noise.
Q1
I'd just like to agree with your interpretation of its slightly supernatural dimension.
MN
Good art should be, shouldn't it?
AD
Now there's one piece that - again I'm familiar with the pieces only by hearsay - but there was a piece that I would love to have experienced which was at the art gallery at Brown University. The description of it was of fingers snapping across the space at great velocity.
Here's the analogy. A colleague of mine had a parrot, and like parrots generally it was a tremendous imitator. But this parrot was able to mimic dishes falling on the floor and breaking, a cascade of dishes falling on the floor and breaking. And it was disconcerting because instead of saying 'Polly want a cracker' or 'Hi Mike' or the kinds of things parrots say it would open its beak and there would be this cascade of crashing china. It was an awful thing to have to be invited to a dinner party at their house. But you know that you yourself could not make that noise, no matter what. I couldn't imitate, but the parrot was able to imitate. And I think what knocks me cold about the idea of these incredibly fast finger snaps - I don't know how many there were - was it a single finger, was it a chorus of fingers?
MN
It was a phrase. It was a single click, but it moved.
AD
You couldn't imitate it in any way; you needed the technology. But at the same time there would have been no temptation it seems to me to naturalize it. It was up there, and you felt that it belongs up there in a certain way.
MN
That was a cultural context, where people were expecting a work. For me the context is where I begin. If it's Times Square or if it's a museum, these are the starting points; these are part of the nature of the thing I form from.
Q2
A precedent for this marriage of architecture and sound could be found in a seventeenth-century compendium by a German, and he describes architectural spaces and palaces and buildings where there were these protomicrophones built into the space. There are these conical spaces within the wall. They were amplifiers that would magnify what was happening outside so you could hear it inside. Of course what's different about your work would be the intentionality. These buildings obviously had a very definite intention about hearing what was outside.
MN
Sound is quite remarkable historically. There are no verifiable records of it from the past. There are no aural artifacts older than the first sound recordings of a hundred years ago. We can only theorize. We don't actually know how language sounded in the past, or how the world sounded for that matter.
But I think from looking at architecture and thinking about the architecture of the past - the Greek amphitheater being a very special acoustic space where a large number of people could hear one person very clearly with ease - it points to a concern at that time with sound that we don't have anymore.
Most architects I feel work with only the visual model in mind it's what it looks like. Perhaps it's just a result of the fact that we have become very material perceivers, but I'm running into your area.
AD
Well, I don't know whose area it is; but I do want to ask another question which has to do with how much definition you can give.
I'll set a problem. There was a piece in London, which has since been torn down, a few years ago by a British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. I don't know if you came across this, but what she did was: there was a block of buildings that was going to be torn down, and in this particular case she filled - I think she used concrete to get the inner shape of the doors and the windows, and then the thing was torn down around it so you had virtually a picture of the inner space of the thing. You couldn't enter the space, but you were able suddenly to see that space.
The problem I want to pose is: could you have done with sound what Rachel Whiteread did with space? Could you have gone in with whatever tools you use and duplicate that space so that it would have the same boundaries, even sharp angles, I'm not altogether sure; but get something like that, and the building goes down and now you come back and you create an acoustical replica of that house - would that be a possibility?
MN
Technically it's possible, I think; though it's a little hard to walk on the third floor when the stairway is immaterial. But I don't know whether I would do it as a work. What I found interesting in your description of that idea was the reversal; that was the startling thing.
But for me building a piece is building a new place. I have to start with a real place, because we don't have a non-space. What I do with that space and the space I make from it have nothing to do with what the space is. It's not an interpretation of the space; it's not a reaction to the space. It's using a given hunk of space and making a place out of it.
AD
In her case it was like the ghost of that house.
MN
Exactly. But the idea was about that place and an interpretation of it, exposing it.
AD
Anyway it would be a nice thing because that would be a piece that might travel I suppose if you could do it, and you could set it up on the campus or you could set it up in a museum, and people would feel that they were encountering the acoustical ghost of a British middle-class row house.
MN
I don't know. When you build a space with sound it's specific to that space; it's made out of that space. There is no way around that. I don't mind the fact that it can't be travelled, it can't be exhibited. I am not so sure that the exhibition is the ideal place to encounter art. I'm also happy that it's not possible to make a retrospective: all these works sitting next to each other.
That all seems very fine. I'm content traveling around in the world and working in different cultures. I don't think it's so important that everyone and hear all my works.
YS
Are there more questions?
Q3
Your work seems to be context-dependent. Do you have any experimental way of working in your studio?
MN
The only thing I can do in my studio is build tools to work with on site. I use the word 'palette' even though I'm not a painter. When I'm building a work, once I've established how I attach sound to the space acoustically, the next thing I do in my studio while the physical part of it is being installed, is begin to set up the things that I want to try in that space.
I walk into a space without a preconception of what the work's sound will be. Finding it is a process that usually takes a number of weeks; it gradually forms through working there. You're right, I can't sit in my studio and work for myself, for sure.
AD
When you did the one in Kassel, you must have done that on site.
MN
Yes. It's actually three large rooms with two glass walls in each, overlooking a park, connected in the center by a spiral staircase - so three separate spaces but identical. The work is made up of three different sounds, one in each space - three layers, so to speak. There are a number of works which take spaces which are physically and visually identical and transform them into completely different spaces just by adding a very fine layer of sound.
AD
But you had to do that on site, right? There wouldn't have been a studio there.
MN
That's the way it always works. I can only build the sound in the place I am building with. You can't carve stone without the stone. I go there, listen, change, try something, make a decision, go on a little further.
Q1
Your criticism of architects for not thinking much about sound or how would you put it more delicately - what would you like to see? Would you like to see architects thinking more about the natural sounds that their environments would produce such as echo, stone or absorption, things that we would learn about in acoustics class, or interventions such as the ones that you make in your work?
MN
No, I don't think it's an area for the architect as intervention. I mean, this particular room has a rather obnoxious sound character; and you don't have to go to a school to learn this. You can walk in it and listen, and you can walk into other spaces and listen and feel what they feel like and examine what they're made out of and try to do something else.
The field of acoustics is just gaining a solid foothold on reality, basically because we have the tools for the first time to do more than guess about what happens to sound. But the best tool for the artist, or the architect for that matter, is a pair of ears and how a space makes you feel.
Q1
So the criticism is coming from a very different place than your work is coming from.
MN
Yes. I am fascinated by sound in general, not just as an artist. I spent twelve years off and on absorbed in the practical problems of police car sounds. I've also made public statements about the concept of noise pollution, trying to make it less simplistic. I don't know much about the process that architects go through in making a space now. But certainly at the time when amphitheaters were built, for example, there was something else going on in the mind than what it's going to look like, and that dimension has been lost somewhere.
AD
I was here thinking of spaces such that when you enter them you automatically lower your voice.
MN
Just as the physical form of a space has an influence on the way people act in it, its aural form also changes the way people feel in it. The same degree of possibilities exist aurally, the range is there. For me walking into most everyday architecture is like an architect walking into a space that isn't visually made - an aural accident.
AD
This would be like using sounds the way colors are used. So you'd say 'the colors are all right' or 'the colors are pleasing' or whatever, 'but you've got to do something with the sound'.
MN
If we think of the acoustic of church architecture, I have the intuitive feeling that there was a holistic approach that involved eye and ear in building spaces at a certain time which we don't have anymore.
AD
I remember once going to a concert of Vivaldi in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome and having a revelation that that kind of music was made for that kind of space. We tend to think that the proper locus of music is the concert hall - it's analogous to thinking that the proper locus of painting is the museum - and this is an all purpose, all service kind of space, and nothing's made specifically for it for the most part. But with the Vivaldi you just felt that it fit that space to perfection.
I've rarely had that kind of experience. Except for Wagner, I suppose, who had Bayreuth in mind specifically, most music is not composed for any space other than the concert hall. I guess the bandstand in the case of John Philip Sousa. But for the most part it's hard to get an architectural tag on most music.
Q4
When you are building a sound, are you trying to make a listener feel a certain emotion? Has anyone been able to make a classification of reactions to sound?
MN
No, I don't think it's ever been done. In a way I hope it never is. But your question is like asking the painter if when he paints a certain kind of red he wants a certain kind of reaction.
That's not how we work as artists. Human reaction to sound is complex. The psychology of sound is a field which is just emerging now because the means of preserving sound and examining it and comparing its result in different circumstances are there for the first time.
When an architect builds a space with a certain shape I don't think he says to himself that this will make this kind of reaction You don't work to build a space for a specific reaction; you work to build a space that works in many ways.
Q4
I was thinking that when you are walking towards a building, first you are walking on the street and that's noisy. Then when you enter the building you begin a whole experience of time and space, and you have the sound of a wall and that begins to calm you down.
MN
Yes, this neglect of the aural is particularly Western, perhaps. In the East, the Japanese garden is as much about sound and sound artifacts as it is about the way it looks. Perhaps it's our particular point time in Western culture. We don't hear anymore.
YS
I think the main difficulty with your work is that it does not as it were lend itself to any comparison. It wants to be sui generis; it wants to be its own genre. And that makes it infinitely difficult.
Sometimes you dodge the issue by using analogies with painting. Well, it isn't like painting. Paintings are done without any particular place in mind. So in the end we fall back on your work in the sense that your work has managed to exist in a space entirely of its own, for the moment.
MN
What more could an artist ask?
YS
Exactly. To be incomparable is after all the desire of everyone.
I want to thank Max Neuhaus again for coming here to speak to us about his particular sound vision of the world, and to thank very much Arthur Danto for agreeing to participate in this discussion enhancing it for everyone. And to thank everyone who came here tonight and to invite you for a drink outside where we could enter into less formal conversation. Thank you very much.
Footnotes:
(1) After a fruitless 15 year search for a cultural institution which would agree to look after the work, rather than have it poorly maintained, Neuhaus put it 'on strike', by disconnecting it in 1992.
(2) This work was destroyed by the museum in 1996.